47 pages • 1 hour read
Albert CamusThe Fall
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1956A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Chapter 1 Summary
The book begins with an epigraph, a quote that references Mikhail Lermontov’s 1839 novel A Hero of Our Time which is famous for its antihero protagonist. The quote states that the book is “a portrait, but not of an individual; it is the aggregate of the vices of our whole generation” (3).
Jean-Baptiste Clamence meets a stranger who is trying to order at a bar called “Mexico City” in Amsterdam. The stranger does not realize the bartender only speaks Dutch and does not understand he is asking for gin. Clamence orders gin for the stranger and brings his own drink over so the two can talk. He calls the anonymous stranger his “cher ami,” meaning “dear friend”, and talks to him about the bartender, calling him an “ape” and comparing him to the ancient humans found at Cro Magnon, France. Clamence admires the bartender’s distrustful nature.
Clamence reflects on France, and his cher ami smiles at his wording. Clamence used the subjunctive tense, which is a grammatical tense in English and a form of conjugation in French. In French, it is not often used and is typically a mark of higher education. Clamence realizes his cher ami is a cultured and educated individual, which makes him the perfect target for Clamence’s ideas.
The two talk about Amsterdam. The cher ami is staying in Amsterdam for some time, which gives Clamence time to convince him about the virtues of slavery. Clamence believes the Dutch are not as modern as French people and compares the modern, middle-class, bourgeois lifestyle to being eaten alive by piranhas. Clamence does not believe the people of Amsterdam are really people, unlike him and his friend. He believes they walk around with their heads in a gin-and-neon-soaked fog, and he compares Holland to a dream.
They receive their gin, and Clamence introduces himself as a “judge-penitent” (8). Both Clamence and his friend have comfortable lives and do not share their possessions with the impoverished. Clamence calls this being a “Sadducee,” a biblical faction that held high social power and denied the existence of the soul.
The cher ami leaves the bar for the night. He is new to the city, and Clamence walks him home. Along the way, Clamence talks about living in the Jewish Quarter. Due to the ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Holocaust, the Jewish Quarter is no longer inhabited by Jewish people. Clamence recounts a story about his hometown and describes how a German officer asked an old woman—very nicely—which of her two sons he should kill. Clamence then tells about a pacifist he knew who was disemboweled by a militia.
Clamence claims to want to help his friend understand the city and society. He compares Amsterdam’s ring-like canals to the circles of hell in Dante’s Inferno. The cher ami supplies the name of the innermost circle of Dante’s hell for Clamence (Cocytus). The cher ami is well-read, cultured, and a man of means. Clamence decides they are very alike and can understand complex ideas, which means that Clamence has found a suitable person to preach his ideas to. He bids his cher ami goodnight, promises to see him at Mexico City tomorrow, and suggests that he visit the sex workers at a nearby “brothel.”
Chapter 1 Analysis
Chapter 1 interweaves the novel’s themes in the narration’s unusual framework. Each chapter is a monologue delivered as a direct address to a “you,” Clamence’s anonymous friend, and Clamence begins early on to dehumanize others. He calls the bartender an “ape” and the people of Amsterdam “silhouettes,” presenting himself as the only fully-realized human present in the novel. Camus reinforces this idea through the lack of people within the novel itself; Clamence is the only character whose motives and feelings the reader becomes familiar with, and no dialogue appears in the novel that is not Clamence’s speech. Clamence is a lonely and isolated individual, and Camus’s narrative strategies aesthetically highlight the novel’s exploration of Alienation in the Modern Era.
Clamence spends his time in Mexico City looking for people to preach to about his “solution” to the modern world. He does not prey on the poor people who frequent the bar but focuses on the middle-class people who visit the poor parts of the city for thrills. Clamence and his “cher ami” occupied the same social position back home in Paris: Both were lawyers and well-read, “cultured bourgeois” (9). It is implied that the cher ami is somewhat persuaded by Clamence; otherwise, he would not spend the following five days with him. The cher ami has the same social status as Clamence, which clarifies the book’s epigraph; Camus believes the most extreme examples of society’s failures can be found in the middle class, and he uses Clamence and his friend to reflect this. Camus directly addresses his middle-class readers by having Clamence address his middle-class friend as “you” in his monologues.
Camus positions Amsterdam as an allegory for Dante’s Hell, intentionally evoking the 14th-century poet’s famous Inferno to explore notions of Innocence and Guilt as expressed through the archetypal story of the Fall of Man. Camus includes Amsterdam’s history as a major “slave-trading” hub, the ethnic cleansing of its Jewish people during World War II, and the legacies of colonization including the appropriation of idols of Indonesian gods as decoration to portray the city as Cocytus, the innermost circle of hell in Dante’s poem. Cocytus is home to those who have betrayed their family, country, or community in some way, including Satan himself. Camus juxtaposes historical events with Dante’s description of Cocytus to suggest that slavery, genocide, and cultural appropriation are indicators of treachery. Amsterdam bears the marks of the worst treacheries against humanity. Clamence enjoys these facts greatly: He loves slavery, wishes trading enslaved people was still a respected profession, and is excited by living on top of the “greatest crime” of the Holocaust (11). Clamence’s love for the markers of hell indicates his depravity and fall from grace, the full extent of which the novel will explore. By immediately establishing Clamence as both self-aggrandizing and morally reprehensible, Camus locates the novel’s dramatic conflict within the hypocrisy of his protagonist, rather than as dependent on external, unfolding plot events. As Clamence has now found a willing listener, his subsequent monologues will deepen Camus’s thematic interrogation.
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By Albert Camus
